Impressions

    Walking through the streets among the hills of this surprising land, so full of treasures of every age, you feel the triumph of humanist thought, which finds noble and perfect expression in the magnificence of buildings conceived in a design of ideal city, in which everything responds to a structurally aesthetic functionality.
    You remain captured by this enchanted land, that among reliefs and gilded valleys gets lost to the horizon as a succession of waves in a green sea.
    From here illustrious minds began to move, projecting into the Renaissance firmament, as rising and then perennial stars, to mark the route of each navigator the art and beauty.
    The culture seeps from the stones, from bricks and limes cementing the buildings, risen as monuments of knowledge, from which supreme artists derived their transcendent visions.
    You can still go, then, along the ancient paths of city centers, through new ways of human conceiving, leading to rethink the quality parameters of our existence in this vision of harmony and lightness.
    Each step represents a leap into the past, which remains closely linked to present and future, in a perpetuity that bypasses the concept of temporal limit.
    A great place to stop and meditate on the direction of the live and of the aspirations, which here seem to suddenly become more vivid, more farsighted and higher.
   

The Ducal Palace of Urbino

    The work that has most immortalized the memory of Federico da Montefeltro was initially entrusted, at half of '400, to the Florentine Maso di Bartolomeo, who was occupied to connect it to the ancient Palace of Jole, the Duke's residence until then.
    But it is to the next action of the Dalmatian architect Luciano Laurana that we owe the grand project of building in the form of city, where the refined sense of aesthetics and proportions of Renaissance were combined with the most advanced housing technologies and the most effective military engineering.
    The distinctive feature of the building, so characteristic in the definition of the profile of the town, is certainly the facade with Torricini, which lightens with its thin verticality the grandeur of the mass, in relation to the sequence of the elegant central loggias.
    Inside, it opens up the famous Court of Honour, a masterpiece of classical harmony and composure, from which, through the grand Staircase, you lead to the staterooms, which culminate in the imposing splendor of the Throne Hall.
    But the wonders appears to be symbolically concentrated in the small yet magnificent Studiolo, created for the meditation of the Duke among portraits of famous men, wishing to inspire his thoughts and deeds.
    Amazing is the inlaid wooden furniture with effect of illusion of perspective, on drawings by Botticelli.
    The construction was subsequently extended with a second floor in the sixteenth century by the architect Girolamo Genga, however, altering the original examplary appearance of first project.
    In addition to the richness of the furniture, the palace was full of original works of art of immense value, scattered today among the most important museums of the world, and boasted a rich library of over 2000 illuminated volumes, constituting one of the most important treasure chest of Renaissance.
    Despoiled especially after going to the Holy See, the nakedness of the structure makes it stand out even more architectural expertise, culminating in the invention of the environment for household use, with advanced hydraulic systems that powered the bathrooms and the kitchens, and a singular Neviera (apparatus to collect the snow).
    Allocation in the building of the National Gallery of Marche has allowed a partial recovery of the original profusion of art, with works by Paolo Uccello, Justus of Ghent, Raphael and Titian, as well as important collections of paintings, stone sculptures, terracotta, polychrome and gilded wood, inlaid panels, furniture, tapestries, drawings and engravings from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century.
    Stand out, in particular, the two masterpieces by Piero della Francesca, the Flagellation and the Madonna of Senigallia, besides the famous Ideal City, attributed to Laurana, symbol of the urban aesthetics of Renaissance.